Monday, 19 July, 2021

Using the local digital declaration to get your digital work going

Photo by Amélie Mourichon on Unsplash

The local digital declaration is three years old as I go to keyboard. I was privileged enough to be around at the time it was being put together, had some small input into it, and helped to promote it. I think it is well and truly a good thing.

What it does is define for the whole local government sector what digital is all about. It removes those misunderstandings that digital is just about channel shift, or better websites, or one single other thing. It explains that while good digital is not just about technology, it also is about technology, and how you have to get that and the culture right to make progress.

Hundreds of councils have signed up to it. Many did so, I am sure, because it was a commitment to doing things right, and because they believed in it. I suspect some signed up because they wanted to be in the cool crowd, even though they weren’t really bought into the whole thing. Plenty signed up because it meant they could apply for some funding. That’s a shame, but it’s understandable.

The truth is, signing up to the declaration is easy (thanks to it being a good digital service!). Living up to it is hard, and I would wager that not one single council could really say they are living and breathing every ambition and commitment in there. But that’s ok – it’s fine to be aspirational, as long as you are actively aspiring, and not just doing nothing.

Signing the declaration, or making a big deal of trying to meet all of its statements if you signed it a while ago, is a great way of getting some momentum going on your digital work.

Here’s 5 ways how to get cracking right away:

Use it to get the bosses excited about digital

Get some senior people together on a Teams or Zoom call, and take them through the declaration. Focus on the elements of it that are likely to resonate with them, such as:

  • fixing the plumbing of poorly implemented line of business software and untangling the spaghetti of multiple systems that overlap and don’t talk to each other (apologies for the metaphor mixing)
  • focus on the transformation of organisational culture and ways of working, which will be at the top of many people’s minds, particular now as we exit the lockdown of 2021
  • emphasise the potential for sharing technology, research, experience and knowledge through the network of signatories, including the great funded projects that can be tapped into
  • maybe mention the funding too if there’s still some available. Free money always goes down well

Encourage the leadership that this presents a clear to do list to become a sector leader in digital, as long as there is some commitment to making it happen – and maybe have a few small exmaples up your sleeve of things you could get on with quickly, and can report back to show progress.

Start blogging

A key part of the declaration is bringing the really positive open working culture of the internet age into our organisations. The best way to do that? Start blogging.

Seriously, it is not hard – and it is a great test of your mettle as a change agent in your organisation, and of your organisation’s commitment to the digital agenda, particularly if the culture where you work is one where blogging is a tricky thing to get started with.

There are loads of models to follow, but the really easy one to do, I would suggest, is:

  • register a blog at wordpress.com – it’s free and easy, and you don’t need to ask permission to do it. Call it something like [Name of Council] Digital – simples.
  • write some weeknotes. Just a quick bulleted list of what you’ve done that week, if your nervous, or try something more contemplative if you’re confident about it. Check out the web of weeknotes site operated by Matt Jukes for inspiration.
  • when you’ve published a few posts, show your boss and explain how it helps meet the declaration thing you spoke at with them a few weeks ago. Ask if you can email a link to your weeknote to the leadership team every week to get them interested

Boom! You’re on your way to an open, digital culture. Now get cracking on laptop stickers and posters.

Run some service assessments

Sometimes this is seen as an incredibly daunting thing to do, but actually done the right way service assessing is a great way of introducing people to what is really important in delivering good digital services.

Now, for those working with very estblishment outfits like GDS and others, service assessments can be pretty formal gateway style checkpoints, to prevent poor digital services from going live. That’s exactly how it should be for such organisations, but if you’re just starting out, then a bit of compromise is needed.

Instead, use the service assessment process to demonstrate to folk across your organisation what good looks like, and how much of a positive impact just doing a bit of user research could have, or how we could be really sure our information security is spot on, or indeed how we could have saved money if we’d just used that thing IT bought last year, rather than buying another new thing just for this service.

Find some enthusiastic friendly folk to be on your panel. If you can find someone from another organisation who has done it before, all the better. People don’t need to be digital experts, they just need to be interested and curious, and maybe have had a read of the service standard beforehand, and be good at asking sensible questions.

At the end, rather than a strict go/no go decision on whether the service can go live, you’ll have a list of improvement that could be made to it, or maybe a checklist of things to do on the next service you’ll work on.

At Croydon we did a very early service assessment on our own digital blog which was a great, low risk place to start. Here’s the summary report which gives a flavour, and how it’s not that scary a process, not really.

Get involved in a funded project

The declaration fund enabled a lot of projects to get going, and several of them have survived into being in a usable state. That sounds like faint praise, but it isn’t – it’s only right as you go through the cycle of discovery to alpha then beta then live that some stuff drops out along the way. We can’t do everything all the time, after all.

Take a look through, especially those that made it to the beta phase, as these really ought to be thing you can make use of. I’m particularly proud of LocalGovDrupal – an open source, website in a box for councils that is now being used by several councils, including Brighton and Croydon.

If you’re at the right stage to make use of something built by the sector for the sector, then that has to be a great win for you, your organisation and your digital plans.

Join some networks and start sharing

Collaboration is key to the declaration, which is music to my ears. It’s what drives SensibleTech, after all, and inspires me to share this stuff with you all.

You can get together with others in exactly the same position as you in other organisations up and down the country by connecting through groups such as LocalGovDigital and OneTeamGov. There’s also a bunch of helpful people on Twitter who you can track down and LinkedIn can be useful too for meeting folk and finding out what others are up to.

Also take a look at the events that folk like Nick Hill run, which are free and provide loads of opportunities to meet and learn from others.

If you’re nervous and not sure where to start with joining some of these network, just yell, I’d be happy to introduce you.

#Using the local digital declaration to get your digital work going

Friday, 16 July, 2021

Legends of low code recording

This Tuesday Nick and I ran the legends of low code panel session, and much fun was had, and great learning shared.

I was joined by:

  • Kev Rowe, Croydon Council
  • Craig Barker, Cumbria County Council
  • Clare Evans, Tewkesbury Borough Council
  • Lee Gallagher, Hertsmere Council

Check out the video recording above, to hear about

  • the great low code projects all the councils have been working on
  • the cultural changes that went alongside the technology switch
  • the downsides of using low code and how to overcome them
  • who is best placed to become a low code developer in your organisation
Watch the video
#Legends of low code recording

Monday, 12 July, 2021

Creating simple user personas

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash

Personas are a great place to start with user centred design, particularly if the whole practice is new to your organisation. This is because they can provide a quick and cheap way of ensuring your project puts the different types of user at the heart of your service design process.

Personas are fictional representations of the different types of potential users of your service. Well written ones can bring the important user types to life, which is why it helps to make them as realistic as possible. They also help to give the project team focus, by constantly reminding them of what really matters to their users. Finally, they are a great way of engaging stakeholders with your work, introducing personality and something relatable.

They can have their downsides though:

  • often personas aren’t based on user research, but assumptions
  • they can sometimes focus on what user’s want rather than what they need
  • they can get stale quickly – don’t fall into the trap of not updating them or using the same personas over and over again
  • They should not be the only form of user centred design that is used in a project – personas are not a shortcut or a tick in a box

So make sure you use them properly, and most importantly of all – do your research first!

To make your life easier, here is a simple template to use for your user personas. Feel free to amend it in any way you like to make it work for you.

Hope it’s useful!

#Creating simple user personas

Monday, 5 July, 2021

CDO chat with Ben Unsworth

It’s taken a while to record the second CDO Chat video, but today I finally had the joy of an hour of Ben Unsworth‘s virtual company!

Ben has done loads in digital government, including stints at the Home Office and with FutureGov, and these days he is the Director for Service Transformation at Essex County Council.

In this video, we talk about Ben’s role and what it encompasses, the importance of accessibility in digital services, the roles needed to make change happen, and the impact of the lockdowns and the future of work. Oh, and of course we hear a little about his shed too.

If audio is more your thing, you can grab that on Soundcloud.

#CDO chat with Ben Unsworth

A CDO chat with Ben Unsworth

It’s taken a while to record the second CDO Chat video, but today I finally had the joy of an hour of Ben Unsworth‘s virtual company!

Ben has done loads in digital government, including stints at the Home Office and with FutureGov, and these days he is the Director for Service Transformation at Essex County Council.

In this video, we talk about Ben’s role and what it encompasses, the importance of accessibility in digital services, the roles needed to make change happen, and the impact of the lockdowns and the future of work. Oh, and of course we hear a little about his shed too.

If audio is more your thing, you can grab that on Soundcloud.

#A CDO chat with Ben Unsworth

Monday, 28 June, 2021

Legends of Low Code online event

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Update 16/7/2021 – here’s a link to the recording of this session.

On Tuesday 13 July, between 2pm and 3.30pm I will have the pleasure of chairing a panel session discussing the use of low code platforms in local government.

I’ve been involved in the implementation of low code in a couple of councils, and in the right circumstances it’s a great fit. In the panel session, I’ll be exploring what those circumstances are, and what some of low code’s pitfalls are, as well as what it is brilliant at.

I’m going to be chatting with the following ‘legends of low code’:

  • Kev Rowe, Croydon Council
  • Craig Barker, Cumbria County Council
  • Clare Evans, Tewkesbury Borough Council
  • Ben Evans, Ashfield District Council
  • Lee Gallagher, Hertsmere Council

Big thanks to Nick Hill for organising the panel – as well as being informative, it should be good fun too.

Sign up for the event

#Legends of Low Code online event

Monday, 21 June, 2021

Matching user needs with tech capabilities

Photo by Patrik Michalicka on Unsplash

Something that I have found helps an awful lot is having a simple way to match identified user needs with the technology capabilities needed to meet them.

It helps in two main ways:

  • by encouraging people to consider the user needs they are trying to meet before thinking about technology solutions (always tempting, but dangerous!)
  • by reinforcing the message about capability-based technology delivery, as opposed to always thinking in terms of single monolithic systems

By considering user needs first, then identifying individual capabilities to meet them, it’s possible to come up with solutions that are more likely to succeed and can often be cheaper and quicker to implement.

A good example of when I used this was when I was advising on a new intranet project. The initial requirements list had all sorts of stuff in it – HR policies, telephone directory, social networking, better collaboration (whatever that means!), and loads of others.

I was able to break it down into the needs we were trying to meet, and then come up with the technology capavilities to meet those needs. I found that adding an extra translation layer betwene the teo – tasks – helped with doing this. Here’s an example below:

  • User need: I need to know if my pay will increase this April
  • Task: quickly and easily access details of pay grades and scales, via search or navigation
  • Technology capability: publish pages of content

Pretty obvious perhaps. But let’s look at another need:

  • User need: I would like to understand the organisation’s policy on remote working
  • Task: find and read a policy document
  • Technology capability: share and manage versions of documents

Now, traditionally both of these things are requirements for an intranet. But broken down in this way, we can understand that we need an intranet to publish pages of content, but perhaps for the sharing of formal documents, a more specific capability is needed?

I then add a fourth column, which outlines the potential technology to deliver the capability. In the latter case, this could be a system such as Sharepoint or Google Drive, which may already exist in the organisation.

By following this process through with all the identified user needs, you’ll end up with a list of what technology you’ll need, along with a map of what you already have that can do those things, and where you have gaps.

To make it super easy, here’s a Google Doc template, with a worked example for the intranet, that you can copy and make use of.

Hope that’s useful!

#Matching user needs with tech capabilities

Monday, 14 June, 2021

CDO chat with Kit Collingwood

A few months ago, I recorded this chat with Kit Collingwood, from the Royal Borough of Greenwich, about her work at the council, the new digital strategy she authored, and how she and her team are tackling the many challenges facing those working in digital in local government.

If you just want the audio, you can grab that on Soundcloud.

Stefan at Strategic Reading said about this interview:

This video conversation is modestly billed as a CDO chat, but is actually a master class in strategy development and application. The approach is deceptively simple. Two people who bring both depth of experience and thoughtful reflection range over everything from rapid mobilisation in the face of a pandemic, through the vital importance of using data effectively, the challenges of dealing with dominant vendors, creating a team with the right balance of expertise and humility, and giving that team the support to design and build services which meet the needs of people outside and inside the organisation.

#CDO chat with Kit Collingwood

Monday, 7 June, 2021

Do you need a digital programme?

Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash

The mechanics of making digital change happen in an organisation can be really complicated. What works in one place may well not stick in another. It all depends on strategy, structures, politics and personalities.

One common approach is to have a clearly defined digital programme. In many ways it makes perfect sense: you have a strategy in place, and a programme to implement that strategy. Having a programme helps you bid for some (most likely capital) money to help make it happen, you get a clear timescale to work to, and some benefits (savings!) to realise – not forgetting a programme board to report back to the big-wigs on how you’re progressing. What’s not to like?

Let’s look at the pros:

  • Unlocks money ✅
  • Allows you to recruit people ✅
  • Buys technology ✅
  • Clarity of purpose ✅
  • Clear governance ✅

Sounds pretty good! But wait, there’s cons too…

  • Capital money will disappear ❌
  • Those people you recruit are only there for the length of the programme ❌
  • Have you set aside time and money to ensure your new digital products are transitioned to BAU support? ❌
  • What are you going to do about continuous improvement? ❌
  • How are you going to keep those big-wigs excited about turning up to your board, two years in? ❌
  • The admin overhead can be significant if you aren’t careful – who is updating the programme plan, and generating the highlight reports? ❌
  • You’re on the hook for those savings – are they really in your power to deliver? ❌

The last point is crucial and getting consensus on this early is vital. Capital funds for programmes are usually given on the basis of a business case – in other words, for every £1 invested, £3 is expected to be saved. But, whilst the money is funding digital activity, the savings won’t be coming from the digital team – they will be created within the departments where services are being redesigned. As part of a programme, there must therefore be absolute clarity on what savings are coming from where – and a willingness to offer them up when the time comes.

A digital programme brings focus, and resources. It will get you going for sure. The danger is that it is temporary and they rarely allow for the planning and investment needed to maintain a new digital estate in a business as usual situation.

They can also become real pressure cooker environments, causing stress, anxiety and burnout – so you do have to make sure you look after yourself and your team, especially in the run up to board meetings.

Sounds like I am pretty against digital programmes. Perhaps I am – my preference would always be to build a permament team to do this stuff. Make digital change the business as ususal! It takes out a lot of the stress and anxiety, and makes it far easier to embed digital ways of working, and the core concepts and culture of agile, user centred design and so on.

However, in the real world, creating a digital programme is a mandate to get things done, as well as a shortcut to funds, which means people and new technology, if you need it. If you do go down the programme route, then the two most important things to get in place, for me, are:

  • agreement and clarity on savings and where they come from
  • a plan for the transition to BAU for the new digital services, and a properly funded regime of continuous improvement.
#Do you need a digital programme?

Monday, 31 May, 2021

Creating good, simple user stories

Photo by Felipe Furtado on Unsplash

User stories are the strongest way you can capture requirements for your digital service and are another key component in taking a user centric approach to design.

Rather than the old way of doing things, of producing a specification document outlining every single feature that a product needs to have, user stories focus on the needs of the users of that product, and specifically on their outcomes.

This focus goes a long way towards producing services that are usable and deliver end to end, rather than breaking down halfway through because a feature ‘works’ technically, but doesn’t do what is expected or needed.

Additionally, user stories can be a great way to bring a product to life when describing it to stakeholders. It really demonstrates a new way of talking about digital services and technology, and can be very meaningful to non-technical folk, giving confidence that you’re doing the right thing.

In a multi-disciplinary team, the user stories are usually the domain of the product manager, written with the input from the rest of the team. If you don’t have all the roles in your team, then do try to have a single person responsible for the compilation of user stories – and try to have someone non-technical doing it, to avoid the temptation to leap into solutionising too soon.

Writing a good user story follows a certain format:

  • As a…
  • I need to…
  • So that…

For example:

  • As a new, and busy resident who drives to work in the town centre
  • I need to apply for a parking permit online
  • So that I don’t run up loads of parking fines

That’s quite a high level example (often referred to an ‘epic’ story), so we can probably come up with a more granular user story:

  • As a resident who has applied for a parking permit online
  • I need to be proactively kept informed of the progress of my application
  • So that I don’t need to keep contacting the council

Note that the user story doesn’t explicitly state here what the solution is. The focus is on the outcome that the user needs, not the technology that will enable it.

The technology is likely to be mentioned in the second main element of a user story, which is the acceptance criteria. These are descriptions of what done looks like for this story. The GOV.UK Technology blog shares a nice method for writing good acceptance criteria, based on the pattern ‘Given… When… Then…’.

Additional information for a user story might include the prioritisation of that story, so the team know how important it is to get that story completed, and also the size – how much effort is likely to be needed for the story.

Here’s some tips for writing good user stories:

  • Keep them small. If they start getting to wide in scope, treat them as an epic and break them down into smaller stories
  • Avoid the temptation of repeating your ‘I need to’ in your ‘So that I can’ – which is a really common error. For instance – ‘As a manager, I need to access my team’s performance dashboard, so that I can view the perform dashboard’
  • Don’t treat individual technical pieces of work as user stories. They might be important to the project, but that doesn’t mean they directly contribute to meeting a user need, and doing so can clog things up and spread confusion about what the outcome of the project is intended to be
  • Try following the INVEST (Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable) formula for producing good user stories. It’s a handy framework to ensure your stories are what you and your users need. Read more about that here.

To make life easier, here is a simple template for writing user stories. Feel free to amend it any way you like!

Hope it’s useful!

#Creating good, simple user stories

Thursday, 18 February, 2021

Interesting links – 18 Feb 2021

I find interesting things to read, bookmark them, save a chunk of text as a quote, and then occasionally copy and paste it all into a blog post, so you don’t have to.

Digital Inclusion Toolkit: now live

Leeds and Croydon Councils recently won central government funding to create a comprehensive and collaborative how-to guide for digital inclusion.

Link

Delivering and accelerating in a pandemic – DWP Digital

Within DWP Digital our Technology Services team designs, builds and operates that platform, and in the last 10 months has ‘moved mountains’ to keep those services going.

Link

Working Smarter Field Guide

Learning informally and socially means connecting our individual work with our teams, communities, and networks. It requires honing our curiosity and seeking out different perspectives and ideas. It takes more than individual sensemaking to understand complex situations, so we have to find others to challenge our assumptions and learn at the edge of our professional abilities.

Link

The tiny video toolkit

People ask me [Coté] how I do the tiny videos. I hope to do a screencast at some point, but in the meantime, here are some notes.

Link

Announcing our new digital skills training offer – MHCLG Digital

We’re inviting local authority staff to apply for one of 10 certified courses with FutureLearn, covering a range of topics such as accessibility, design, decision-making and leadership. We’re testing the water with a small number of licenses and courses, but if we get enough positive feedback we’ll look to purchase more and make it an ongoing thing.

Link

#Interesting links – 18 Feb 2021

Monday, 15 February, 2021

Friday, 12 February, 2021

Monthnote February 2021

February is a short month, of course, but this one seems to have lasted for ages! Perhaps the impact of lockdown.

The month started with snow, and we had a good amount here in south Lincolnshire, enough for Ruth and I to make a pretty good effort at a snowman. It’s interesting, I think, that there were none of the histrionics that normally accompany heavy snowfall in this country. Most people were at home anyway, so it was fine. Turns out that’s probably what we ought to do every time there is heavy snow – just stay home and get on with things as best you can. It doesn’t last long.

The end of this lockdown appears to be approaching, but for those who are missing their social life, I Miss My Bar is a fun website, providing some ersatz pub-like atmosphere for wherever you happen to be.

I’ve had to start house hunting again – my hopes for being settled in one place for a while were dashed when my landlord put a for sale sign up outside my house! Charming. Hoping I can find somewhere where I can just be for a little while and give me a chance to save up properly for a deposit so I might buy myself a house in the future.

Work continues to be a challenge – there is almost constant change happening, and this brings with it the need for a lot of organising, adjusting, explaining and planning. It is exhausting, particularly when in the context of the pandemic. The (non-covid related) death of a member of the team this month hit many of us hard, especially those that were close to him. A reminder of the important things, and of how fragile life can be.

I’ve not blogged much this month, but have a few ideas for things to write about – and the fact that I have now finally discovered how to write posts in WordPress using the old classic editor might help me a bit! Not a fan of the block editor that has come in recently, so being able to avoid it is great for me.

I published the ‘CDO Chat’ with Kit Collingwood, which at the time of typing has over 550 views, which is amazing given its length and subject matter!

I shall have to find a willing victim for another soon!

I’ve also got my first coaching group organised, and we started things up yesterday. Technically that’s in March though so I shall say no more about it for now.

Book-wise, I thought it had been a slow month, but on checking it turns out I did ok:

  • Judgement on Deltchev, Eric Ambler – pretty good espionage thriller, set in a fictional Eastern European country after the second world war
  • The End of the Affair, Graham Greene – absolutely superb, obviously
  • A Room with a View, E. M. Forster – had a lot of fun reading this, nice to follow the Greene with something rather lighter
  • Asylum, Patrick McGrath – I love McGrath’s unreliable narrators, and this is a classic example. Fantastic writing. Rather oddly, my paperback was missing the first 13 pages of the story (!) so I had to read the start as a free sample on my Kindle!
  • The Anglo-Saxon Age, John Blair – an Oxford Very Short Introduction, a series I love. I’m a bit obsessed with Anglo-Saxons and early English history at the moment (blame lockdown!) and this provides a gloriously concise summary.

This month in movies…

  • The Grand Budapest Hotel – almost too whimsical, but some great performances amongst an amazing cast
  • Hail Caesar! – great fun
  • Inside Llewyn Davis – literally nothing happens, but it does so beautifully
  • The Lighthouse – utterly bonkers. I have no idea what happened in this film
  • The Ides of March – a slick political thriller, very engaging

I’ve also really been enjoying the US version of The Office on Netflix, and Channel 4’s Great Pottery Throwdown. Continuing my current obsession with medieval English history, I can also thoroughly recommend 1066 – A Year to Conquer England, which is entertaining and informative, even if it employs some slightly odd and distracting techniques at times.

#Monthnote February 2021

Need volunteers for an experiment in group digital coaching!

I am looking to recruit a small group of digital doers across local gov to help me test an idea I have had – for a virtual coaching group.

What I think this looks like is maybe a group of 6 people working in local government on digital ‘stuff’ in one sense or another. I don’t think specific roles, experience or levels of seniority matter particularly – in fact a mix will probably really help the group dynamic.

Involvement will be some online conversations, sharing problems, frustrations, ideas and solutions with each other through a mix of text chat, video calls as a group and one to ones. I’ll be in there too, adding whatever experience I might have.

This really is just an idea for now, but it will be interesting to test it to see if it has benefit. If you would like to join, or know someone who might benefit, please let me know by filling in this short form.

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

#Need volunteers for an experiment in group digital coaching!

Tuesday, 9 February, 2021

Interesting links – 9 Feb 2021

More nuggets spotted online, shared for your edutainment.

5 tips on running virtual events – DWP Digital

One of the biggest learning points for the events team was that you can’t take a plan for a physical event and simply run it virtually instead. It just doesn’t work. You need to create a way to engage attendees remotely, while they’re having to do most of their work through their screens, from their home. However, virtual events have a lot of opportunities for being inclusive and allowing people to join in regardless of whether they can travel to another location.

Link

Retail, rent and things that don’t scale — Benedict Evans

Part of the promise of the internet is that you can take things that only worked in big cities and scale them everywhere. In the off-line world, you could never take that unique store in London or Milan and scale it nationally or globally – you couldn’t get the staff, and there wasn’t the density of the right kind of customer (and that’s setting aside the problem that scaling it might make people less interested anyway). But as the saying goes, ‘the internet is the densest city on earth’, so theoretically, any kind of ‘unscalable’ market should be able to find a place on the internet. Everyone can find their tribe.

Link

Being Human – Catherine Howe

Bureaucracies are designed to protect themselves from harm – they have formal complaint routes and escalations and a hierarchy that is there to maintain the status quo. And when you look at a wider context you can see some of the drivers for this – the more we see a world based on risk and blame the harder it is for us to be human and authentic in our interactions.The first time fix of customer services is allowed for simple questions – to go there with more complex stuff brings levels of risks that most bureacracies are not comfortable with as it takes you to the place of difficult choices and trade off – the messiness of complexity.

Link

The Real Novelty of the ARPANET – Two Bit History

Today, the internet is a lifeline that keeps us tethered to each other even as an airborne virus has us all locked up indoors. So it’s easy to imagine that, if the ARPANET was the first draft of the internet, then surely the world that existed before it was entirely disconnected, since that’s where we’d be without the internet today, right? The ARPANET must have been a big deal because it connected people via computers when that hadn’t before been possible.

That view doesn’t get the history quite right. It also undersells what made the ARPANET such a breakthrough.

Link

#Interesting links – 9 Feb 2021

Thursday, 4 February, 2021

Interesting links – 4 Feb 2021

Some bits and pieces I have been reading lately.

The relentless Jeff Bezos – Stratechery

What is clear, though, is that any attempt to understand the relentlessness of the company redirects to their founder, Jeff Bezos, who announced plans to step down as CEO after leading the company for twenty-seven years. He is arguably the greatest CEO in tech history, in large part because he created three massive businesses, all of which generate enormous consumer surplus and enjoy impregnable moats: Amazon.com, AWS, and the Amazon platform (this is a grab-all term for the Amazon Marketplace and Fulfillment offerings).

Link

To build or to buy – that’s the technology question – GDS Technology blog

Regardless of the route you choose, you cannot outsource risk. It’s important to make sure you have the resources, insight and knowledge to manage and oversee your products in the long-term – whether you build, buy or both.

Link

Users or people? – dxw

As Russell Davies said in his blog post, Consumers, users, people, mammals: “If you need reminding that your customers/consumers/users are people you have bigger problems. Changing what you write on your briefs/stories isn’t going to help.”

Link

#Interesting links – 4 Feb 2021

Tuesday, 2 February, 2021

Setting up my new Mac

So, I got an unexpected refund from the Student Loan Company (bonus!) recently and spent it on one of the new MacBook Airs. It’s a beautiful machine. Apple seem to have fixed the keyboard issues they were having a little while ago, it’s lightning quick, and the screen is gorgeous.

I’ve not had a Mac for a few years now, relying on my work-supplied Windows laptop, and a Chromebook for other personal bits and pieces. I must admit, I didn’t think I had missed it much – but I’ve found myself realising that, actually, I had just learned to put up with a load of frustrations!

So what software did I put on this thing?

Browsers – it comes with Safari as default, but I added Chrome and Edge. I’m logged into Safari with my personal Gmail account and use that for day to day browsing. Chrome I use with a G-Suite account, to keep that tidy and in one place, and Edge I use for an Office 365 account for the school I help govern. I know there are many ways to create standalone apps from websites, which is an alternative way to keep all these account separate, but I’m happy with this solution.

From the Mac App store I installed some stuff I bought years ago, but are still perfectly good for my needs:

  • BBEdit – I use the free version of this veteran Mac app as a simple text editor
  • Pixelmator Classic – good enough for the image editing I do, although there is a new, Pro, version out
  • Evernote – still the best way to capture notes of all kinds, I’ve tried others, like OneNote, Bear and Notion but keep coming back to this.
  • Omnioutliner – not something I use a lot, but sometimes using an outliner to plan thoughts is a really helpful method, and I’ve not come across a better tool that Omnioutliner.

Stuff I installed from the web:

  • Transmit – a great, easy to use FTP client. Mostly used to help managed websites
  • Zoom – well, duh
  • Microsoft Office – I don’t actually use it that much these days – Google Docs does the business most of the time, but occasionally the MS suite cannot be avoided so it helps having it on here. Also it comes with Teams, so…
  • NetNewsWire – previously, I used Reeder for my RSS aggregation (yes! I still do that!) but on this Mac I went ‘back’ to NNW. I put ‘back’ in quotes because it’s an entirely new, open source application these days. It works great.

I also took out a subscription to SetApp, which gives access to a whole host of useful Mac apps for a tenner a month:

  • Bartender – helps keep my menu bar tidy. Inessential but nice.
  • Capto – a fairly easy to use screen recording app. Screenflow used to be my default choice in this space on the Mac, but as this was included in SetApp’s bundle it saved me money to use this
  • CleanMyMac X – tidies up the crud that builds up on any computer over time
  • Cleanshot X – an improvement on the default screen grabbing tool
  • Gifox – makes simple animated GIFs
  • Marked – takes documents written in Markdown and exports them to various formats. Useful when it is needed, which isn’t all that often
  • MarsEdit – the grandaddy of desktop blog editing apps, every post I write starts off here
  • MindNode – mindmapping tool that’s a joy to use
  • Paste – a clipboard manager. If you’ve never used one before, you don’t know what you are missing. Keeps a record of everything you copy, so you can paste it at any time in the future
  • PDFpen – for wrangling with PDFs
  • Prizmo – turns scanned documents into editable text (OCR type stuff)
  • Rocket Typist – like Paste, a tool you don’t know you need until you try it, then you can’t live without it. This allows you to set system wide shortcuts that automatically expand short snippets of text into longer ones. My personal favourite app in this space is TextExpander, but this works well and doesn’t cost me any more money.
  • Ulysses – an app for composing longer form writing projects. It uses markdown and presents a pretty minimalist writing experience. This is an app I felt I ought to download but haven’t actually used for anything yet.

I also invested in an Anker USB hub thing, to make up for the lack of ports on the laptop. It’s an elegant design and seems to work very well.

Photo by Thom on Unsplash

#Setting up my new Mac

Monday, 1 February, 2021

Monthnote January 2021

A new year, a new attempt to return to semi-regular blogging. I’m trying to post little things often, rather than getting trapped into writing long posts that never get finished or published. You may have noticed I posted a video from Janet Hughes and a note on using CloudReady to bring an old laptop back to life.

The photo adorning this post was taken on my phone on the fens near The Wash at Gedney Drove End, near the RAF bombing practice site. Yep, it’s as bleak as it sounds. Beautiful in its way though.

The start to this year has been interesting, continuing the carnage from 2020. Having been in a ‘tier 4’ location before the festive break, the new lockdown barely affected me. I’m pretty used now to the limited world I inhabit.

Work has been challenging and the issues at Croydon are fairly well documented. Even people not existing in the bubble of local government are aware of it, so it must be bad. However, we keep on keeping on, making things a little bit better everyday whilst dealing with some of the more unpleasant cost-cutting measures that are being introduced.

One of the good things about lockdown is the sheer amount of cultural stuff I’ve been consuming. 2020 was a bit of a record in terms of book reading for me, 58 books read in total. In January 2021 I got through five, which is a good start:

  • Our Game, John Le Carré – classic Le Carré: middle aged bloke reads things and thinks. Gripping but I have no idea how he makes it so
  • An Introduction to English Poetry, James Fenton – a wonderful introduction to reading poetry, makes it all seem so simple
  • A Very British Coup, Chris Mullin – fast paced thriller, no Proust by any stretch but it rattles along
  • The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin, Georges Simenon – another brilliant Maigret (last year I started reading them in order – this is number 10 of 70 odd)
  • The Hatred of Poetry, Ben Lerner – interesting book length essay, the main thrust of which is that poems always fail because they aim so high

At least three of those are very short, you may notice, which certainly helps with the numbers. But it also helps with the flow – too many long reads one after the other does affect one’s motivation to read, I find. Also a weird mixture of thrillers and literary criticism. Hey ho!

Music-wise I have been utterly obsessed lately with Taylor Swift’s two albums from 2020, Folklore and Evermore. Have had them on almost permanent repeat for the last few months. Special mentions though to the re-release of the KLF’s better known tracks, and Four Tet’s Parallel.

Lockdown is also great for watching films. This month I saw some really good ones, most for the first time:

  • Synedoche, New York – absolutely baffling, I have watched so many YouTube videos explaining what this is all about, but I still am not really sure!
  • Frances Ha – nice, short, heartwarming and quirky
  • The Royal Tenembaums – I’ve never watched this all the way through before and I am pleased I put the time into doing so. Lots of whimsy but the time passed by very quickly and there were a fair few laugh out loud moments
  • Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri – Overall I really liked it, had the feeling of everybody knowing what they were doing. I found the Damascene conversion of one character a little hard to take though.
  • Away We Go – slightly smug, somewhat whimsical, but fun overall
  • Burn Before Reading – a brilliant way to absolutely waste an hour and a half. A tale of idiocy in which nobody learns anything.

All in all, a decent start to the year on various fronts.

#Monthnote January 2021

Friday, 29 January, 2021

Bringing a knackered laptop back to life with CloudReady

As part of the fun and games that is homeschooling, my daughter started off begging and borrowing computer time from me and her mum. It wasn’t ideal so I casted around for a better solution, so she could have her own bit of kit.

I had a fairly ancient, tiny Windows 10 laptop – the sort of thing that might have been called a netbook 10 years ago – which I hadn’t used in ages because it needed to install an update to the operating system. I couldn’t perform the upgrade though because there wasn’t the space to download it on the tiny amount of storage on the laptop! I tried fiddling with SD cards and things, but no joy.

But I came across a thing called CloudReady, which is a product of a company called Neverware. Put simply, it turns pretty much any laptop into a Chromebook – a very simple computer than runs a web browser, and pretty much nothing else.

Getting it set up involved downloading an installer and putting it on a blank USB memory stick, which slightly – but only slightly – fiddly. Installing it on the laptop went like a dream, took about 20 minutes max and there weren’t any problems.

The end result isn’t exactly the same as an official Chromebook, but it’s pretty close. It runs the open source project Chromium rather than ‘Google Chrome’ – but that doesn’t seem to matter too much. She has been able to do the usual things to personalise it, with her own choice of desktop wallpaper and so on, and loves always having a machine available for her work, that belongs to her.

So, if you’re struggling with old tech at home, and if everything you need is accessible on the web, then take a look at CloudReady. Likewise, if you are organising the reuse of old laptops for people that really need them, then CloudReady provides a great, free way, to turn them into usable, easy to maintain computers.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

#Bringing a knackered laptop back to life with CloudReady

Thursday, 28 January, 2021